The DJ from S.F. has crafted both exquisite beats and a carefully cultivated mystique. Find out from him why the lush trip hop is being replaced by a local hyphy sound.

By: Eric K. Arnold

Getting a face-to-face interview with DJ Shadow is, well, a somewhat shadowy pursuit. Weeks of tersely worded e-mail communiques with his New York City based publicist finally resulted in a scheduled tête-à-tête, whose location wasn't disclosed until the day of the meeting. The directions took us, surprisingly, to the sleepy, upscale, boho 'burbs of Marin County, where a thick vale of fog lingers near the top of the hills above Mill Valley, and after a few twisty turns on 101 our designated meeting place, the Acqua Hotel, looms.

While waiting in the lobby for the enigmatic man of mystery to appear, one can't help but wonder what form he'll take. Will he show up in a black ninja suit? Shrouded in acrid smoke? Or will his face be blurred beyond recognition, like the cover of his famous record Endtroducing — the only DJ album deemed classic enough to warrant Universal Records' gaudy "Deluxe Edition" treatment, and a record some compare to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

Unfortunately, the elusive DJ/producer is nowhere to be found, although the concierge reports she heard him speak on the radio earlier that morning. Neither DJ Shadow nor Josh Davis (his given name) are registered at the Acqua. A frantic call to the publicist ensues; she says "he wasn't feeling well" and had to cancel, although she promises to set up a 30-minute phoner a little later. Ten minutes later, she calls back. A hole has miraculously opened up in Shadow's schedule, and he's now available for an in-person at his house, located just a few minutes away. More twisty turns are taken through the streets of Mill Valley, and finally a pink stuccoed split-level domicile, modest by Marin standards and not the dark, foreboding dwelling one might expect of Shadow, appears.

When Shadow comes to the door, his face is fully visible. Just returned from six weeks on the road (in the U.K., Spain, Hong Kong, and Australia), he somehow looks rested and relaxed, with nary a trace of tour hangover. Dressed simply in a white baseball cap, faded white T-shirt, camouflage hoodie, and stylish Bathing Ape sneakers, his trademark soul patch a fiery shade of red, he apologizes for the confusion, which he attributes to miscommunication between his manager and his publicist. Offering a glass of tap water, he sits down on the floor — there's very little furniture, as he's currently in the midst of remodeling — and begins an illuminating two-hour conversation that would dispel some of the mystery surrounding the artist.

Right away, one misconception about Shadow is dashed to smithereens: that he's not talkative or engaging. Patiently and casually, he describes fully his long career, personal life, and the furor over his new album.

The Shadow answers questions pensively, with his head down, but looks you directly in the eye in between queries. One gets the feeling he does not suffer fools gladly, and is more than just a little weary of being asked the same questions over and over again. On his Web site, he posts a FAQ and suggests interviewers read it before talking to him so as not to elicit a "glazed-over response."

"Everyone wants to know about hyphy," he sighs. "I'm not a hyphy expert by any means." In case you haven't been paying attention, hyphy — a combination of "hyper" and "fly" — is a lifestyle, a culture, and a music that started on the streets of Oakland, spread throughout the Bay Area, and became a national movement. Primarily associated with inner-city youth living on the fringes of society, and celebrated by local turf rappers, the hyphy movement has been criticized for promoting drugs, violence, and illegal sideshows, yet its musical component and colorful slang has proven contagious and captivating enough to endear it to the suburbs, commercial radio, and MTV. Lately, it seems, a lot of people have been hatin' on hyphy, a sensitive issue for Shadow, since a considerable amount of criticism of his use of the form has been directed at him.

DJ Shadow, born Joshua Paul Davis in the flatlands of Northern California's Central Valley, is something of a magician, except in a musical sense. After serving an apprenticeship under various radio DJs and hipster label owners, Shadow blossomed from a crate-digging, beat-crafting teenage prodigy into a deconstructionist equally adept at reconstruction, a guy with not only a finely tuned ear for music, but a dedication to his craft way beyond obsessive. In the highly competitive DJ world, he's become one of its biggest superstars, with a rabid, if music geek-y, fan base on both sides of the Atlantic, a solid reputation among his peers, and, as he boasts on his Web site, a "bulletproof resume."

After paying dues in the music game since the late '80s, Shadow can afford to be a little bit cocky. He's built himself up from a nobody to a figure who commands cover stories in all the leading electronic music mags and has inspired a mountain of gushing press quotes. He regularly packs huge arenas in foreign countries, has a 19-page (!) discography on his Web site, had a video ("Six Days") directed by art-house favorite Wong Kar-Wai, and hauls in a six-figure income from touring, merchandise, record sales, and an online shop. Through it all, his mystique has only grown, to the point where it's impossible to tell if he's really a mysterious, brooding genius or just a cagey smart aleck with a carefully crafted image.

But with his latest album, The Outsider, Shadow has altered his familiar, non-threatening musical stance, recasting himself as a hip-hop visionary and embracing the bay's upstart hyphy movement. With that bold move, he runs the risk of alienating his faithful devotees, but also stands to gain untold legions of new listeners. Will his audacious gambit result in a fanboy backlash? Or is he leading the vanguard of an international breakthrough for Bay Area music? Like pioneering comic book writer Will Eisner might say, only the Shadow knows.

On the surface, the notion of trip hop's greatest icon joining forces with the hyphy movement would seem a puzzling one. However, "anyone who really knows his tastes knows that Shadow is a huge fan of gangsta rap, especially from the bay, and always has been," says music journalist Oliver Wang. "Will he lose some fans? Possibly," Wang speculates. "Any time an artist reinvents him or herself, there's always that risk."

Many of Shadow's longtime fans are indeed upset that he saw fit to change his musical direction after more than a decade of churning out lush, beautiful, atmospheric trip-hop soundscapes and the occasional warm and fuzzy alt hip-hop single. But now he's being called a "hyphie (sic) cockrider" and worse by belligerent bloggers, who can't understand why their hero degraded himself and sullied his stellar legacy by working with Bay Area rap artists like E-40, the Federation, Turf Talk, Keak Da Sneak, and Nump.

Shadow gallantly defends his rep, pointing out that he's always been a fan of Bay Area artists and, furthermore, he started his career working with local rappers, so why shouldn't he be allowed to continue that tradition? Although he admits he "totally lost touch with bay music" between 1996 and 2002 — the period when he blew up internationally — he casually name-checks local rap classics like Lil Bruce's "Mobbin' in My Old School," an obvious precursor to hyphy that bigs up classic American muscle cars (called "scrapers" in contemporary parlance).

Shadow's reintroduction to the local scene began around 2002, when he moved his home studio to the Mission District and found himself listening during his commute to KMEL, which had recently begun to play local artists again after a long drought. Inspired by the production work of Rick Rock, a Fairfield-based producer considered the architect of the uptempo, energetic hyphy sound, Shadow decided to make a Bay Area record, one that would be, as he puts it, "deceptively simple." He enlisted rappers Keak Da Sneak and Turf Talk for what would become The Outsider's kickoff single, "3 Freaks" — an almost industrial-sounding, pulse-pounding jam whose chorus repeats the rappers' names until it becomes a hypnotic mantra: turf-talk-and-keak-da-sneak/ turf-talk-and-keak-da-sneak/ turf-talk-and-keak-da-sneak!!!!

"I heard of his name, but I wasn't too, too familiar with his music," says Turf Talk, an E-40 protege who's generated enough local buzz to spill over into national write-ups (for XXL and the New York Times). Turf pays Shadow perhaps the ultimate compliment, in thug-speak: "I heard he was a factor."

Shadow explained to the rappers that he wanted to go in a different direction with his sound, and as Turf relates, "everything just fell into place when we got into the studio." Shadow was a little reluctant to release the song as a single initially. The finished track was "slappin'," Turf exclaims, "I was like, man, you gotta put this on the radio. ASAP."

With numerous successful international tours, producing classic songs like Latryx's "Lady Don't Tek No" and his own "High Noon," and solid, though not astounding, record sales (Endtroducing notched platinum status in the U.K., moving in excess of 100,000 units), Shadow had etched out a comfortable niche for himself — Too Short and E-40 are the only other Bay Area hip-hop artists signed to major-label deals throughout the past decade. But Shadow never had a song included on local turf-rap mixtapes, or warranted radio play on "hot urban" commercial stations until "3 Freaks." As his Web site notes, "Ô3 Freaks' was a song that was inspired by the bay, made for the bay, and embraced (at least initially) by the bay."

However, electronic music heads who'd found their bliss with the intricate use of samples in songs like "Midnight in a Perfect World" and "What Does Your Soul Look Like" felt perturbed, even betrayed. To them, "3 Freaks" sounded like ignorant "garbage shit rap" unworthy of being affiliated with Shadow; blogosphere-circulated rumors that even more hyphy songs were to follow on his new album agitated them further.

As Internet chat room discussions heated up (the threads can be viewed at DJShadow.com and Solesides.com), opinions about Shadow's stylistic shift overflowed into open resentment — paralleling the initial unhappiness among Greenwich Village hipsters over Bob Dylan's sea change from acoustic folk to electric rock 'n' roll in the mid-'60s, not to mention the kvetching among bop fans when Miles Davis ushered in jazz-fusion with Bitches Brew and Live-Evil.

Rather than attempt to squash the beef by kowtowing to popular sentiment, or making apologies, a defiant Shadow lashed out at his critics on his personal blog. Downplaying his detractors as a "couple of disgruntled bloggers," he said, "It's hard for me to take some 30-year-old dude from New Jersey or wherever seriously when he tries to critique a culture and music he knows nothing about."

His rant continued: "I care about what hard-core fans think, but they lose me when they ask me to just repeat myself. I feel like if they understand Ôthe real me' the way they claim to, then they would understand why to ask me NOT to change and pursue my musical interests goes against everything I have ever stood for. Repeat Endtroducing over and over again? That was never, ever in the game plan. Fuck that. So I think it's time for certain fans to decide if they are fans of the album, or the artist."

To understand who the "real" DJ Shadow is, one has to time-travel back to the mid-'80s, when Josh Davis was an introverted teenager growing up in Davis, California. Obsessed with record collecting and hip hop even at an early age, he started bringing homemade tapes to jocks on the local college station, KDVS.

Oscar Jackson — better known to fans of political hip hop as Paris, the "Black Panther of Rap" — was hosting a graveyard shift show on KDVS when he first encountered Davis. The future superstar DJ was just a "pee-wee" then — 12 or 13 years old, in Jackson's estimation. Jackson remembers him as "a pretty quiet cat ... The DJ Shadow moniker fits his personality," he says. "That's not to say he doesn't have opinions."

In 1990 author Jeff Chang was a UC Davis student, and also hosted a show on KDVS (going by the name DJ Zen), when he first met Shadow. "He had a knowledge of the music not a lot of other people did at the time," he says — in part due to Shadow's father's record collection, which allowed him to identify obscure tunes like the Isaac Hayes song "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic" looped by Public Enemy on "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos."

Shadow began bringing his own homemade mixes by the radio station. His mixtapes showed a diverse interest in music, frequently incorporating original breakbeats, as well as electro music's various offshoots: freestyle, Miami bass, and new wave — everything from 2 Live Crew to Debbie Deb to Depeche Mode. On one occasion, Chang recalls that Shadow brought him a Maxell cassette with a remix of Eric B & Rakim's "I Know You Got Soul." Chang played it on the air, and "after a minute or two, I started screaming, ÔThis is incredible!'"

In addition to figuring out how to scratch on a belt-driven JVC turntable with a straight tone arm, Shadow was experimenting with advanced production techniques. "He created this whole remix, four beats at a time for a four-minute song, and then had the audacity to try to figure out ways to flip that beat and create an actual song structure for it," Chang says. "That's how he created most of those early mixes ... I guess you'd call it mash-ups now."

Shadow's ambition pushed him to ever-further heights in the music industry; his talent has helped him stay there ever since. He quickly progressed from KMEL mix-shows to remix and production work for both domestic and overseas labels. In 1993 he became one of the mainstays of James Lavelle's influential Mo' Wax label, whose abstract takes on club music formed the basis for the trip-hop movement of the '90s. At the same time, he was making weird, funky hip hop with the Solesides (now known as Quannum) crew — Chief Xcel, Gift of Gab, Lateef, and Lyrics Born —whom he'd met, quite appropriately, while browsing the record stacks at KDVS.

In 1996, Shadow released Endtroducing (on Mo' Wax/A&M), the record that would make him a superstar. Released first in Europe, the English press went absolutely apeshit over it; when the album was released Stateside months later, so did the American media.

Endtroducing intellectualized hip hop by presenting the record as found-art object and making a strong case that sampling wasn't theft, but an art form in and of itself. "This was considered the Ph.D. on crate-digging," says Ben "Beni B" Nickleberry, a founder of the Bay Area Hip-Hop Coalition and owner of Oakland indie hip-hop label ABB. "It was a dissertation on sampling."

While other Northern California DJs (such as Quest, Apollo, and Q-Bert) were earning fame as turntablists for their scratching and beat-juggling prowess, Shadow had quietly developed into a composer. He wasn't just a DJ-cum-producer making simple sample loops, but someone who could take fragments of old records, blend them together, add his own special touches, and make them seem like entirely new songs.

Endtroducing also brought the underground record-collecting subculture known as crate-diggers into a much wider pop cultural sphere. Its cover depicts a blurry, unrecognizable Shadow along with two other renowned diggers — Beni B and Blackalicious' Chief Xcel — engaged in their favorite pursuit, flipping through stacks and stacks of ancient, obscure vinyl at some anonymous record outlet, in search of the dusky gem with the superlative drum break or ber-funky horn riff that could then be sampled and looped.

"Prior to Shadow, crate-digging was largely thought of as an N.Y.C. hip-hop thing," explains Wang, a noted digger himself. "What Shadow did was bridge that subculture to the suburbs and really help fuel an interest in Ôbedroom producers' the same way DJs like the Invisibl Skratch Piklz had helped broaden the interest in scratching."

Race may have also factored into the equation; Wang speculates that "(Shadow) being white and from Northern California is completely relevant, too, since he offered a different image — literally — compared to the New York school of diggers who were mostly streetwise black and Puerto Rican guys versus geeky suburban white dudes for whom Shadow was probably an easier role model to follow."

Wang notes that N.Y.C.'s DJ Spooky — who is black — has been panned in some music circles for doing ambitiously artsy projects, while Shadow has received laurels for doing pretty much the same thing: " ... what Shadow was applauded (for) — a thinking man's approach to hip-hop instrumentals — is precisely what Spooky was criticized for."

Shadow deftly sidesteps the issue now, explaining with a shrug, "I'm not trying to be anything I'm not. I'm a college-educated, middle-class dude from Northern California." He points out that he worked with Paris — a rapper widely known for his pro-black sentiments — back in '92, adding, "I don't see what Spooky does and what I do as the same thing." Shadow sees himself not as an intellectual, but as a lover of music, and if people want to intellectualize the music he loves, well, that's their problem.

Still, European audiences in particular — who weren't always suburban, but were predominantly Caucasian — fell in love with Shadow, eagerly soaking up every limited-edition vinyl single or obscure trip-hop compilation he appeared on. As one blogger blurted, "If DJ Shadow farted on the mic ... I'll prolly end up buying it."

Shadow's fans and the music-crit mafia experienced dejà vu all over again when his second album, The Private Press, was released in 2002 on MCA. And no one complained that his numerous side projects — including a Japan-only remix album, The Private Repress; the Brainfreeze and Product Placement mix compilations of obscure soul-funk 45s with Cut Chemist; and film scores for Marc Singer's "Dark Days" and Brian Cross' "Keepin Time" — resulted in a long wait time between official albums.

But while Shadow had helped to define alt hip hop through his involvement with Solesides/Quannum in the '90s, his attempts at making rap music tended to be highly experimental (like the schizophrenic title track of 1996's Latryx album, wherein Lyrics Born and Lateef's vocals are simultaneously tracked on separate audio channels) — it's a far cry from the aggressive, polished, and certifiably street-credible material showcased on The Outsider.

Unlike his online detractors, who have questioned hyphy's very existence, Shadow sees hyphy as not only a viable, authentic sound, but part of a cultural continuum connecting bay artists like Sly Stone, Digital Underground, and Keak Da Sneak. A "certain quirky sensibility" flows through them, he says; listening to their music, "you can get a sense of the culture."

What made hyphy music attractive to Shadow was its "unique energy," he explains. "It sounds like where we live." Perhaps more importantly, "it didn't have an eye to the past. It looked forward ... it felt like the future to me." After exhausting his well-worn, meticulously crafted sample- and MPC-based shtick on The Private Press — which he describes as "a really insular record" whose making was "laborious and lonely" — he decided it was time to change up his modus operandi. "I always wanna be happy making music," he explains. Rather than meet fans' expectations and keep making the same album over and over again, he chose to satisfy his own artistic yearnings.

At the same time Shadow was questioning his creative process, big things were happening in his personal life that changed his perspective on reality. "I've found a lot of reasons to celebrate life, and I wanted to recognize that," he reveals. In 2003 his wife gave birth to twins. Becoming a dad had an unforeseen effect on Shadow he wouldn't have anticipated — it lifted some of the darkness surrounding him and made him less worrisome.

Some of his new-found lightheartedness translated to the upbeat, fun-affirming tracks on the new album, like "This Time," "Enuff," and "Dats My Part," which all revel in the joy of living in the present moment. "I wanted to celebrate my talent, celebrate the bay, and celebrate the diversity of music," he says.

"I've always been able to hear music on its own merits," Shadow explains. "It's a release, a reflection of society. It can contribute to larger problems, but I don't think it's the cause of them." And while the same people who rhapsodized over songs like "In/Flux" might be shocked to discover its author grew up listening to 2 Live Crew's "Throw the Dick," he doesn't see anything wrong with making a song like "Turf Dancin."

"Some people might think, ÔOK, here's DJ Shadow dabbling in real hip hop,'" says Count, a member of S.F. electronica outfit Halou, who engineered The Outsider. "Why can't he make a hip-hop record? He knows that stuff as well as anyone," he notes wryly.

Shadow's interest in hyphy "opens up Bay Area hip hop to a wider audience," reasons Nickleberry, while Wang theorizes, "it doesn't make sense for him to stick with the Endtroducing style 10 years into his career. Flourish or flounder, good artists find ways to reinvent themselves."

In the process, however, Shadow has "burned down the house Endtroducing built with a hyphy blowtorch," noted the U.K.'s Spine Magazine.

Not only is The Outsider Shadow's most accessible album to date, but it's easily his most extroverted, and also his most risky. Its success hinges on whether he'll gain enough listeners among conventional rap fans to offset the loss of some of his cultlike following, "people who feel they have ownership of what I do," as he says. So far, early reviews are mixed; Endtroducing fans tend to either compulsively hate it or tentatively proffer faint praise for the production quality while dissing the raps, while other critics have complained about its seeming lack of thematic consistency. "The Outsider suggests that DJ Shadow is now simply doing too much," opined Rolling Stone.

Indeed, it's quite possible that no one but Shadow would have the balls to incorporate everything from psychedelic garage-rock to Albert KingÐesque electric blues to post-Katrina Southern crunk to uptempo, conscious hip hop to hardcore turf music and, yes, trippy instrumental beatscapes.

On The Outsider, Shadow explains his intent was "to defy perception a little bit" by making a record that was entirely different than what he'd become known for, but still represented him. Although he'd accumulated enough credibility in the music industry to get almost anybody on his project, "I didn't want it to be a superstar cavalcade," he says. To that end, he enlisted a group of relative unknowns — with the exception, perhaps, of N.Y.C. legend Q-Tip and Bay Area legend E-40 — and attempted to make "something totally unique to their body of work and my body of work."

At the time The Outsider's hyphy songs were recorded, the Bay AreaÐoriginated subgenre had yet to experience the mainstream breakthrough that happened in 2006, when E-40's breakout hit "Tell Me When to Go" conquered MTV and commercial radio — making Shadow seem more like a Nostradamuslike prognosticator than a trendy bandwagon-jumper. The point of working with artists like the Federation, Keak Da Sneak, and E-40, Count says, was to make listeners think, "OK, this is taking it to the next level of hyphy."

Hyphy does indeed take an evolutionary step forward on "Keep 'Em Close," in which Alameda's Nump shows a lyrical depth not previously apparent on his own songs, like 2005's radio hit "I Gott Grapes." On the track, Nump comes off like a ghetto Jim Thompson, telling a twisted, wickedly ironic tale of criminality and paranoia set in the grimy underbelly of the Yay Area that name-checks the Fruitvale BART station and "Vietnamese patnas" in San Jose.

Working closely with Shadow, Nump says, inspired him to elevate his game and experiment with a more conceptual lyrical style. "Shadow brought that out in me and helped me to do it more. That track right there ("Keep 'Em Close"), it's solid, I love it. It's like a movie."

The Outsider's opening intro, written by Shadow and voiced by Oliver Tobias (in full Laurence Olivier mode), also has cinematic qualities. The Sci-Fi ChannelÐready narrative is set "in the twilight of time," when "humanity's at a crossroads." Just when things are at their bleakest, a mysterious figure emerges: "A being without a name, faceless and obscure" who is "part presence, part idea." The narrative serves to further Shadow's mystique, presenting him as an iconoclastic, esoteric rebel, whose unorthodox methodology creates its own mythology. The two-minute track, whose vocal is backed by an increasingly ominous beat, may be somewhat self-indulgent (and possibly tongue-in-cheek), but it gets its point across: Shadow is an aural illusionist who not only blurs fantasy and reality through his art, but can change the very way music is perceived by the listener forever.

Though Shadow can be calculating, deliberate, and methodical at times, it would be a mistake to assume he's a dour, overly serious dude with no sense of humor. He's more than willing to laugh at himself, and while his enigmatic image might seem contrived to those who don't know him, he's still getting used to the idea that he's become a pop culture icon. When asked who the "real" DJ Shadow is, he pauses for a long, reflective moment, than says innocently, "I think I care a lot about music." In that sense, he hasn't changed a bit since his pause-tape days 20 years ago, though the circumstances surrounding him have. Though he's affiliated with the biggest record label on the planet (Universal), he's maintained his indie ethic. "I don't need a limo," he adds.

"There's no turning back now," Shadow wrote in his online tour diary after describing watching kids in Barcelona singing the words of "I Gott Grapes." Shadow not only took his hyphy homies with him overseas, but did it on his own dime, paying for flights, per diems, and tour accommodations. It was worth it, he says, to help local Bay Area folks get a leg up in Europe, even if it resulted in less dough at the end of the day for him. "What they do with [hyphy] from now on is on them," he says — he's done his part to spread the movement.

For the Bay Area rappers, going overseas and playing before crowds of 6,000-10,000 in large arenas nightly was an eye-opening experience, to say the least. "(Shadow) told me, Ôman, we gon' go on tour,' and at the time, none of us really thought it was true," Turf Talk says. "He took us out there and we were able to see something that maybe we'll never see again in our life, you know what I mean? That's big."

Turf recalls one particularly cathartic moment, when he and Mistah F.A.B. were looking out over the city of Barcelona, from a hotel pool on the 16th floor, thousands of miles and, it seemed, several dimensions removed from 'hood life. "We was tripping out, man, thanking God. From where we come from, from what I done did, and what I done seen, it's big to know that now I'm doing something positive."

Another tour highlight was the Wireless Festival in London, where Shadow and crew shared a bill with pop music A-listers like Gnarls Barkley, Damian Marley, and Pharrell and hung out with jet-setting supermodels like Paris Hilton and Devon Aoki. Shadow's tour diary had more to say on the subject: "We looked like a pack of dead-end kids from the other side of the tracks, with everyone turfed-out in Bay Area tees and Girbauds."

Shadow's blog could barely contain his excitement over being the first to introduce hyphy to Europe. "I felt proud to have contributed to the movement by broadening everyone's horizons and allowing the world to see what the Bay has to offer," he wrote.

While The Outsider will certainly go down in history as Shadow's most ambivalently received, even controversial, album to date, not all of the chat room discussions regarding it were negative; some compared Shadow's sea change to the similar stylistic transitions of Miles, the Beatles, and Charlie Parker; one blogger even made an analogy between Endtroducing and The Outsider and Picasso's blue and cubist periods. Despite the online bickering, nobody really has anything bad to say about Shadow personally; while he does hip-hop music, he's not a domestic abuser or murderer, but a married man with two kids whose idea of relaxation is to go on record-collecting road trips. And while hyphy might not be welcomed by some, it plays well in the bay, as does his introducing local artists to European audiences. The one valid criticism that could be levied at Shadow prior to this album is that he makes hip hop for white audiences, and he's addressed that in a major way with The Outsider without being too overt about it. As he says, "I love rap music. I don't want to imitate, mimic, or water it down. I want to keep the continuum moving."